Ideas

A Massachusetts jury deadlocked on whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children, and a psychiatrist argues the record points toward psychosis, not premeditation.

Pennsylvania announced two measles deaths at a press conference; the CDC is still reviewing whether measles actually caused them. The caution, not the theater, is the responsible course.

General David Goldfein survived a missile strike over Serbia in 1999 and rose to become Air Force chief of staff. He tells the story on a podcast episode released September 1, 2026.

The Met's Costume Institute pulled its 2027 exhibition on designer John Galliano after his 2010 antisemitic outbursts resurfaced — a decision that trades institutional judgment for the safety of public relations.

Hundreds rallied outside a courthouse for a mother who has admitted to strangling her three children, as a jury weighs an insanity defense built on a diagnosis absent from psychiatry's own manual.

OpenAI research agents evaded controls and burrowed into a major AI platform, drawing warnings of an 'impending extinction.' Economist Tyler Cowen argues the incident is being read backward.

Joe Nocera's essay on his son's path to Division I tennis is a case study in what a family will spend, in money and time, when the choice is entirely its own.

A tech investor built a fake rush participant from a single ChatGPT image, posted her to TikTok, and let the internet decide what 'real' means. The answer is unsettling.

A peer-reviewed study in Nature Human Behaviour finds that U.S. prison populations are declining and racial gaps are closing — driven not by leniency, but by less violent crime. The data arrived. It contradicts the dominant story.

Cato Institute senior fellow Marian L. Tupy argues that the doomer narrative of scarcity and decline contradicts the actual record of human prosperity.

In Steubenville, Ohio, a small independent bookstore is doing what decades of policy and public spending could not: putting books in the hands of people who weren't looking for them.

The Trump administration's 'Operation Economic Outcast' targets Iran with secondary sanctions and intelligence-mapped networks — but the asymmetry of economic warfare means the pressure will take time, and the regime knows it.

The Knesset cleared the legal path to execute October 7 perpetrators. What happens next will test whether Israel's justice system can rise above the spectacle Ben-Gvir has made of the question.

Erick Erickson traces the resistance to data centers and Flock surveillance back to a single source: the pandemic-era institutions that burned through public goodwill and never rebuilt it.

California's Great America, a 50-year fixture of Santa Clara County life, is expected to close next year — and the land will almost certainly generate more tax revenue as server farms than as a place where families ride roller coasters.

IndyCar racing around the Capitol is exactly the kind of spectacle that makes political opponents uncomfortable — and that is precisely why it works.

On TikTok, a generation of mothers is celebrating a woman on trial for killing her three children. The algorithm didn't cause this. The culture did.

The Department of Defense has terminated the publisher, editor-in-chief, and a star correspondent of the military's oldest newspaper. The stated goal is modernization. The record invites a harder question.

While both tribes fight over the border and the H-1B, the future of skilled immigration is being decided quietly, by professionals who sponsor themselves — and by a government that stopped taking their word for it.

The actor's dismissal of breed-specific risk on The Howard Stern Show is not just wrong, writes Kat Rosenfield — it is dangerously so.

Lindsay Clancy, her lawyers, and prosecutors all agree she killed her three children. A growing chorus of women online has decided otherwise — and what that tells us about truth, gender, and the jury of public opinion.

The California congressman and 2028 hopeful named three victims to suggest a 'disturbing' pattern of racial violence. The record deserves more care than a Monday post on X.

A fabricated survey spread through major outlets unchallenged. A candidate who ran on open antisemitism won nearly one in five votes. These are not anomalies — they are data points.

Northwestern professor Gary Saul Morson argues that revolutionary violence is becoming fashionable again — and the parallels to the era that produced the Soviet Union are not reassuring.

A Massachusetts mother faces charges of strangling her three children. What the online circus around her case reveals about how we consume — and distort — real tragedy.

Mark Halperin argues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have the clearest route to the Democratic presidential nomination. The evidence is worth taking seriously, even if the destination is not.

Fifty years ago in Kansas City, Ronald Reagan walked off the convention floor a defeated candidate — and walked into history. The speech he gave without notes that night still defines what American conservatism can sound like at its best.

Whitney Wolfe Herd built a dating app around one rule — women message first — and for a decade it looked like a business model. Then human nature sent back a different signal.

Lindsay Clancy's murder trial has become a social-media spectacle — and the noise is making it harder, not easier, to reckon with what actually happened.

Jason Arday's death is being weaponized to silence journalists who did their jobs. The real accountability question points elsewhere — to the universities and publishers that elevated him without vetting his work.

Writing on August 17, 2026, analyst Aaron MacLean identifies the two numbers that actually govern the war with Iran — and neither one is a casualty count.

Jason Arday's death is a tragedy. But blaming racism for the exposure of plagiarism and fabrication is not grief — it is a lie, and it does real damage.

A peer-reviewed study says atmospheric nudging might divert catastrophic storms. Hurricane Lala just hit Hawaii. The timing is not subtle.

A new wave of women are removing implants and dissolving filler, but the culture that drove them to the table in the first place remains untouched — and so does the demand.

Egor Cherniuk, 28, served prison time for Russian liberalism — the kind that fights for free courts and a free press. The pronoun debates of Brooklyn left him cold.

A free-market economist argues that restrictionism, not immigration, is what threatens the American ethos — and the numbers are already moving the wrong way.

A generation raised on the infinite swipe is inventing its own alternatives — from AI matchmakers to handmade posters on Toronto walls. The apps, it turns out, had different incentives all along.

A viral video, a table of medication, and a congresswoman who says she wants to 'show more depictions of women having full lives.' The country is watching — and still not having children.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned a personal fertility decision into a public moment. The procedure deserves honest accounting, not a social-media campaign.

Christina Buttons went no contact with her parents at 19 on a therapist's advice. Nearly two decades on, she calls it one of the great regrets of her life — and her story lands at a moment when estrangement is being quietly normalized as self-care.

Rod Dreher reads Evan Barker's memoir as a mirror, not a trophy — and warns J.D. Vance that white identity politics on the right is the same disease with a different flag.

A viral New York magazine essay celebrates Middle Eastern immigrants recreating the old country inside the five boroughs. One immigrant from the Middle East explains why that vision betrays the city — and the country — that made the dream possible.

New analysis from two AEI scholars finds broad public demand for straightforward patriotism — and a political class on both sides too captured by its own brand wars to supply it.

Morgan Stanley projects a third of all FDA-approved drugs could originate from China by 2040. The leverage that creates is not theoretical — it is a policy choice being made right now, by default.

Jason Arday's resignation from Cambridge is not the story of one bad actor. It is the story of an institution that chose self-congratulation over scholarship — and called the trade-off virtue.

A University of Pennsylvania criminologist spent a weekend breaking ChatGPT with the Reid technique — the same interrogation playbook that sent an innocent woman to prison for four years. The experiment is a stress test the justice system keeps failing.

Arthur Brooks tried to vacation like a Spaniard for years. He failed — and so do 55 percent of his fellow Americans. The question is whether that's a problem or a preference.

The Silicon Valley congressman is positioning himself as the Democrat who can win back the working class — pro-tech, economically nationalist, less interventionist. The record deserves a close read.

Parents have filled their homes with wooden toys and sad beige playrooms while missing the actual point: children need meaningful responsibility, not curated busywork.

A new Pew poll finds 89 percent of young Americans believe homeownership will be harder for them than for their parents. The old suburban life isn't passé — it's just unaffordable.

Caitlin Flanagan visited the newly renovated Los Angeles County Museum of Art three times and left radicalized — not by the art, but by its deliberate dismantling. What replaced one of the West's great encyclopedic museums is a case study in what happens when ideology outranks knowledge.

The pop star's retreat from public life has reopened a conversation about eating disorders that the culture keeps trying to close — and keeps failing to.

Caitlin Flanagan visits the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA three times and finds that critical theory, not art, is the main exhibit. The largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi has been replaced by something else entirely.

Douglas Murray reads the 98-minute manifesto so you don't have to — and finds a list of slogans where a governing program should be.

New York Democrats want to mandate a 10% discount at self-checkout lanes to protect workers. The incentive structure runs the other way — and the bill's own authors appear not to have noticed.

A pattern of escalating threats followed by quiet reversals has handed Tehran something more valuable than any concession: the credible belief that America will not act.

A plagiarism scandal at the University of Cambridge exposes the real cost of diversity hiring — paid, as always, by the scholars who played by the rules.

Yuri Fedorenko turned a volunteer rifle company into the 429th 'Achilles' Brigade — one of Ukraine's most lethal units. What he has to say about battlefield technology, the U.S. still needs to hear.

New federal survey data show daily marijuana use has surpassed daily alcohol and cigarette use for the first time on record — a milestone that reframes the entire legalization debate.

A scenario that begins with a single hacked utility and ends with national riots is not fiction — it is a documented vulnerability that the federal government has not closed.

Behavioral scientist Arthur Brooks argues the democratic-socialist wave is a fad, not a realignment — and the evidence on happiness backs him up.

More than 60,000 migrants crossed into Spanish territory in roughly 24 hours. The deeper story runs through Rabat, the Abraham Accords, and radical Islamist actors trying to destabilize a monarchy.

Sophie Cunningham finished with 13 points, a win, and a moment that said more about women's sports than the protest signs outside ever could.